If we don’t do anything about it, it’ll go away. Right?
by morganschapiro
Obama’s Decision to Punt Oil Pipeline Pleases Almost no One.
Quotes:
” In one fell swoop the President of the United States (POTUS) Barack Obama managed to infuriate Canadians and Republican U.S. politicians alike. Those are typically mutually exclusive feats, but his decision to bow to activist pressure and shelve the development of a critical oil pipeline is drawing criticism from both sides.”
“Dubbed the Keystone XL pipeline, the pipe in question was supposed to stretch 1,700 miles across the U.S. plains, transporting process oil sands crude — a low to mid-grade crude to U.S. refineries in Texas for procesing into fuel (the initial removal of sand would occur at local facilities in Alberta).
Currently the Alberta tar sands are underutilized due to insufficient refining capacity. Meanwhile refineries in Texas sit idle due to insufficient domestic oil supplies. The pipeline would have remedied both problems, pumping the equivalent of 700,000 barrels a day (249.2m barrels a year) into the U.S. market. ”
“The U.S. uses 19.15m barrels/day, so the new supply would offer approximately 3.7 percent of the domestic demand. While that may sound trivial, it would allow the U.S. to potentially entirely drop one of its more hostile sources of foreign oil, such as Venezuela (806,000 barrels/day) or Iraq (637,000 barrels/day).”
“The cost of getting all that sand out is a 10 to 30 percent emissions hike in greenhouse gases [source]… However, that emissions hike occurs largely at the extraction level, meaning that as long as Alberta finds someone to sell/ship its crude to, the emissions hit will be taken, regardless of whether that someone happens to be the U.S. It’s unclear whether the pipelines environmentalist adversaries realize this and are just morally opposed to being involved.”
“Recent studies have shown that in the last decade global temperatures flatlined, even as greenhouse gas emission continued to rise. Yet many environmentalists and their powerful political allies remain convinced that the long-term trend will be continued warming. Many of these parties predict a doomsday “runaway warming” scenario, in which soaring temperature amount to mass humans deaths.
Groups like 350.org, Bill McKibben, Bold Nebraska’s Jane Kleeb, and Friends of the Earth decried the potential environmental (mostly global warming) impact of the pipeline and threatened to drop support for President Obama if the project was granted a speedyapproval. If these groups sound familiar, they’re among those who attacked the POTUS onhis support of modern nuclear power — pressure that the President Obama caved to in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident.”
My big issue here is that you cannot have it both ways. You can’t claim that we should avoid nuclear energy and simultaneously complain about the use of fossil fuels, otherwise you are just maintaining the status quo, which is unacceptable. We need to begin to change the way we think. On one end we need environmentally conscious and informed consumers who demand change and vote with their dollars, on the other we need politicians and companies to do the right thing without being coerced. If we don’t, well, we’ll just be living with the consequences and have no one to blame but ourselves.
These are exactly the kind of facts the IC is here to bring to light.
informed conservative 
The Keystone pipeline would cause drastic environmental problems while doing nothing to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. We need to invest in renewable energy like solar power, where China is making huge strides in and putting us to shame.
That is a very good point, although it contains some misconceptions. The keystone pipeline would undisputed cause environmental destruction in the areas that is crosses and the wildlife regions it bisects, although I wouldn’t say drastically. This is,h however, the result of a failure to adopt any other major source of energy generation in this country. Solar is nice, but it is no where near what we would need it to be to power even a fraction of the country. Hope exists in items like printable solar cells and improved photo-chromatic cells that generate a higher level of output, but all these technologies are at least fifteen years away from commercialization and could only take over secondary generation capabilities.
China, while it is making huge strides, is no where near the U.S. in terms of renewable energy and solar innovation. Their government is considerably more inclined to implement such national projects because it is a requirement to support over 1.2 billion people. If you look at this chart: http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/innovation you will see that America still leads the way in innovation when compared to China.